Will the underground economy also have an impact on the performance of the 2023 GDP in the South? A legitimate question if we consider the weight that this “unobserved” economy has at the regional level in Italy, with high peaks in the South. The available data are not yet comparable, because they refer to different years. But the phenomenon exists and has interesting dimensions.
Overall, the 2023 GDP in the South grew more than in the North, driven above all by the construction sector, also in Calabria.The Svimez data indicates a growth of +1.3% in the South (Calabria 1.2%) against a national average of 0.9%. A growth greater than that of the rest of the country, which has not been seen in these parts since 2015. The impact will probably have been momentum in incentives that has given strength to the construction sector (+7.4% in Calabria). We will have to see what will happen in the years to come, when the stop to super bonuses and similar will unfold its effects. Then there is also another data that reinforces growth and that is that of public works and, in part, also of the tertiary sector.
But in general, there are, therefore, more aspects that make up the economic data of the regions, even when these are not entirely “observable”. It is precisely on this unobserved economy (which in 2020 created an added value of 174.6 billion euros) that the “Tagliacarne” Study Center has created a sstudy that shows the situation in the various territories, also revealing some Calabrian data that tell a lot about that underground economy and tax evasion which, again, end up creating critical issues and distortions in the functioning of the market as a whole. The components of this “invisible” economy are four: the hidden economy, that is, those activities hidden from the tax authorities, social security and statistical surveys. A hidden added value that “implicitly entails VAT fraud to the detriment of the treasury as it represents an undeclared taxable amount”.
